This breakthrough is being touted as a turning point for the Japanese government’s efforts to respond to the disaster.

As the clean-up process begins in earnest, many are taking it as a sign that the crisis has finally come to an end.

“Until now, we didn’t know exactly where the fuel was, or what it looked like,” said Takahiro Kimoto, a general manager at the company that operated the plant’s nuclear power arm, according to a report from the New York Times.

“Now that we have seen it, we can make plans to retrieve it.”

Check out the footage below to see the potential fuel debris captured on film:

Around 7,000 people have been at work on the site of the nuclear plant constructing new water storage tanks, helping to dispose of the radioactive debris and building scaffoldings over the badly damaged reactor buildings.

The level of protection needed to work on-site is gradually being scaled back.

A year ago, special clothing was required in all areas. Now street clothes are permitted everywhere except for the parts of the facility that remain heavily radioactive.

The next step will be initiating the removal of the melted uranium fuel from one of the reactors, which is expected to get underway in 2021.

That said, authorities have not yet selected which reactor will be addressed first. It’s expected to take between 30 and 40 years to finish cleaning up the plant, and the project will cost tens of billions of dollars.

There are safe ways to use nuclear reactors to generate power. It’s an important consideration, as there are well-documented drawbacks to using forms of energy that have become more widely accepted and normalized than nuclear power.